Brainstorming Skype Session

This past Sunday, I asked three of my friends to help me with my big problem, asking for helps and advices. 

I was not sure on how to handle this "meeting", as already said I almost never ask for help, so I decided to start from the suggestions made by the participant of my online survey. We went through all the advices in order to get ideas and have a starting point. This are the ideas we came up with:

• Website "Cat-Finder": we thought that a website where people can find every cat in the shelters of an area might be a good idea in order to promote animals that are in shelters less famous than others, or less reachable than others. 
• Social media development: as many survey participants pointed out, only few shelters are active on social media, but today, social media is one of the most powerful way to reach people, in order to promote the shelter and the animals inside. Social media is also a good way to promote "social useful message", and creating awareness for older cat might be one of these cases. Right now, only few famous shelter are active on social media (Facebook above all), but improving this tool is for sure a good idea.
• Person-Cat Match: this idea is probably the most "creative". We were thinking that there might be a lot of people, maybe elderly, who would like to have a cat but they can't keep one at home, maybe because it's too complicated, or they don't have the necessary resources. So we thought that it might be a good idea if the cat remain in the shelter, but the "human partner" can come and take care of him whenever he wants, and give him food and pet him.
• Volunteers strengthening: this is strictly correlated with the above solution. For example, they might pick up these people take have a "match" with a cat and bring them to the shelter, so that it is easier for them to reach the place. Volunteers are important in a lot of different situation, and having more of them let every solution be easier to implement. 
• Shelter Parties: this is the one idea that we rejected. We took inspiration from one suggestion of the survey; shelters should have parties and, taking advantage of the moment, they should show the cats. We decided that this idea was not in line with our focus and goal, and with our "human target" being especially elderly, we didn't think it was a good idea, or, in other words, not our priority. 
• Raise awareness of diseases. Unfortunately, old cats have sometimes some diseases; a lot of people in their comments said that there should be more awareness of what these diseases are and what they mean, because most of the time they require only some medication that are easy to give, while many people are just scared about them. 
• Flyers to get to know the shelters: this is correlated to the fact that most shelters are unknown to most people, and the animals that are there have a disadvantage. Not only they are old so people might prefer someone else, but people don't actually even know they exist. This is correlated to the development of social media. 
• Coupons for food and or vet: this is "so-so" point, we were not very sure about it. The issue is that there are no money in this field, so who would actually pay for these coupons? The shelters are no-profit associations and nobody gets paid, and vets are already doing a lot of thing pro-bono. So it might sound a good idea to promote the adoption of (especially) sick cats, but it might be very complicated to implement.